A Quote by James Baldwin

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. — © James Baldwin
One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.
One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.
But it's a journey and the sad thing is you only learn from experience, so as much as someone can tell you things, you have to go out there and make your own mistakes in order to learn.
The only thing better than "hands-on" experience is hands-off experience - enough experience to understand that some things will turn out better if left alone.
Oswald Chambers writes, ‘Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.’ To that I would add, ‘Be careful not to turn others’ lives into the mold for your own.’ Allow God to be as creative with you as He is with each of us.
One of my friends who writes novels says that once the book is published, it's a separate thing from you; it becomes its own. I feel that way when I read - and that applies to the experience of reading my work in public, too. The essays are a barrier between me and the audience, and it feels like a disappearing act. Poof! I'm gone, and the woman I've created on the page emerges.
I think I have to expand my creativity a bit, because it's difficult for critics to be, "Oh, this person writes their own lyrics and sometimes writes their own beats and sometimes makes her own videos." They funnel me through, "Oh, is it as good as blah-blah's record, which has had 50 million writers on it?"
From my experience, the only thing you can do is take what's written on the page and try, through your own curiosity and investigation, to make it your own and honor what the original intent was.
I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.
When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called 'the writing game' with our father. My brother and I would play it - where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.
I think that is what you want to do as a cinemagoer - to experience something fully. Some things don't let you experience them fully. It may be your own preordained prejudice where you can't experience them fully. But when you come out of the cinema having felt, thought, and experienced your way through two hours, that is a really cool thing.
I never give advice unless someone asks me for it. One thing I've learned, and possibly the only advice I have to give, is to not be that person giving out unsolicited advice based on your own personal experience.
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